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MORNING ©By Russ









Morning sun shooting up like arrows between the trees, golden shafts of light reaching forever into blue sky. Silence encompassing all that I see, until a leaf rustles and bird song bursts the bubble surrounding me. Four woodpeckers swarm the telephone pole, two babies are receiving instructions on the finer art of hiding acorns to the rhythmic tapping of a parental beak. Jimmy’s mewing complaint, delivered while circling tightly around my leg......crying ‘food, more food’, insistently protesting that I haven’t fed him enough. Traffic noises, like waves crashing on rocks, rise and fall from the highway far below. Sudden barking down the road tells me just where Em and the dogs are on their morning walk. Late morning sleepers telling their dogs to ‘shut up damn it', unaware they are just greeting friends passing by. Click, click, thump of flat feet just behind my head. Cockatiel is pacing back and forth on the window ledge, objecting from behind the glass, to being left on the wrong side of everything. One of the few remaining plums falls to the ground, with a speckled robin in close pursuit. A motorcycle, kicked in to submission, roars in complaint, then noisily descends the hill. I return to the house feeling blessed once again.

Russ.....7-13-98